Here Comes the Sun!

One can read only so many garden magazines. The catalogues with their perfect plants are page worn. All the old garden books are memorized. The internet! But one's eyes eventually glaze over, and there is deep longing for fresh air. What's a pent-up gardener to do? Order a new birdhouse. Order a new tree. And pace, pace, watching the weather, hoping for a day of sunshine.

I would definitely be in trouble if I lived in the far reaches of the North, where there are months of winter gloom. I have had to deal with a few weeks, and finally the sun has returned. On Saturday I stumbled out of the house and gulped the warm rays. The temperature went up into the fifties. Spring! Not really, only a tease, but I didn't care.
The front garden, with the sun shining!

I planted this little coral bark tree last fall. I am impressed with its winter color and look forward to the impact it will make when it grows larger.

The dried stems behind the tree trunk is the ground cover indigofera, in the woodland garden. It has fern-like leaves and pink flowers in the spring.
More views around the woodland garden.

I grabbed my unfortunate son who came for a visit and headed for the garden. We planted the new tree, a variegated weeping redbud, Cercis canadensis 'Whitewater'. I have high hopes for it. Because our ground doesn't freeze, winter is a great time for planting new trees, allowing roots to take hold before the stress of summer heat arrives.It's hard to imagine that this old oak tree behind our house was once as small as my newly planted redbud! It has lived through many years of stressful weather. In 1990, its top was ripped away by a tornado, but it continues to survive.

We also transplanted a dozen ferns. My neighbor Betty had told me there were ferns in the valley behind our house, but although this property belongs to us, the hill is steep and the area wild so I rarely go down there. But on Saturday I was in the mood to plant. I wanted to add to the fern glade in the woodland garden, so I dragged my son down into the wilderness and we began digging. Most of the ferns are beautiful evergreen, holly type woodland ferns. My muscular son got to haul them up the steep hill and then dig holes for me in their new location. There are plenty more left in the valley, and I am looking forward to another pleasant day, hopefully when my son will be visiting, so I can continue to enlarge the fern glade. 

Meanwhile, Lou and I have pruned the apple trees and the crepe myrtles, properly — we commit no crepe murder! (This link takes you to a great article published by Southern Living magazine about pruning crepe myrtles.) I also have potted up some pansies. 

The sun is peeking in and out today. Lou is going to install my new birdhouse. We are rushing to take advantage of the nice weather, as rain will be returning tomorrow, or sooner, as already I see storm clouds on the horizon. Soon we will spray the apple trees and many of our shrubs with an ecologically friendly dormant oil. This will reduce insect damage later in the season and also helps to fight some types of fungus. Our season warms up so quickly that this must be done now, before growth starts.

It may be a few days before I can get out to enjoy my garden again. Here are some more images from here and there, photographed while I was taking in the sunshine:

I hope you are enjoying the week!   Deborah

Yaupon Holly: An Unsung Hero

I first purchased yaupon holly because I wanted something that would not die. I was frustrated with azaleas and other plants that had suffered in the summer heat and bright sun of the front garden. I wanted an unfinicky plant to provide evergreen structure to the garden, and, among all plants in my garden, it has succeeded beyond my expectations.

In 1993, a blizzard, a once in a lifetime experience here in the Deep South, dumped three feet of snow atop recently planted 'Compacta' yaupons, a dwarf variety in the front garden. Though many other plants were damaged, the yaupons were unfazed. Since then they have patiently endured blazing heat, draught, and torrential rainfalls. A native of the southeastern USA, this is one tough plant that suffers from commonality but nevertheless continues on as an unsung hero.

Top left: A summer view of yaupons amidst other shrubs growing in the front garden. Top right: In a fall view of another part of the front garden, dwarf yaupons grow in association with silvery artemesia 'powis castle' and nandina 'firepower'. A brilliant Japanese maple grows in the background. Lower left and right photos both show dwarf yaupons growing in the woodland garden, late winter. Note the looser, more natural form of these less pruned specimens.

Yaupon holly, Ilex vomitoria, acquired its botanical name from a Native American custom of using the plant to make a strong tea for use in certain purification ceremonies, which involved vomiting. Not a glamourous name, but I think they are beautiful. Yaupon holly may grow as an evergreen shrub or as a small upright or weeping tree. The females produce bright red berries that are an important food source for many birds. We have a weeping yaupon holly tree near the glass doors in our kitchen, and it is a joy to watch the birds in this tree in late winter. I once saw a flock of mockingbirds strip it of its berries in a single day.We have a good view from our kitchen table of this weeping yaupon holly and its popular berries.

The shrub forms look a lot like boxwoods, with small glossy leaves, dark green above with slightly paler undersides, and the dense, slow growing shrubs are easily pruned into hedges of various shapes. My oldest 'Compacta' matured to about five feet tall and wide. At first I planted my immature plants too close together and eventually had to remove about half of them because they were growing into each other. Yaupon is a common landscape plant, and I often see rows of these things in front of pharmacies and quickie marts, all grown together to form undulating worms. Not the look I was after! The good thing is that I only paid a few dollars each for small ones, so I didn't feel too guilty.

Yaupons grow best in partial shade to full sun in hardiness zones 7 to 10 and will grow in clay, loam, and sandy soils. They tolerate salt spray, wind, and heat and adapt to a wide variety of soil moisture conditions. They are rarely bothered by disease or pests and succeed when many other evergreen hollies struggle.

I like the looser look of a minimally pruned yaupon, and this is how they grow in the woodland areas of my garden. I only snip wild shoots once a year on these, and I would prefer to do the same for the ones in the front garden. But this is where marital compromise has asserted itself. Lou is the owner of a power hedge trimmer, and he loves to use that thing. I have given the ancient boxwoods that grow around the foundation of our house over to him, after clear instructions on how to prune them. He does an admirable job, though sometimes scalping them too severely for my taste.

But a man with a power tool is a man on a mission, and sometimes he casts his eyes upon my yaupons, and if they are growing out of bounds according to his taste, he is sorely tempted. More than once he has sheared them into harsh balls I despise. I prefer to use a good quality manual hedge trimmer, a much more precise tool that gives a softer look and damages the leaves less. Power trimmers, though faster, leave brown edges where they rip through the leaves.

I trim the dwarf yaupons after new growth begins in spring and again in fall as needed. It is important to trim yaupons, boxwoods, and similar shrubs so that the widest part of the plant is at the bottom, tapering slightly toward the top. This allows sunlight to get to the bottom branches. Too often shrubs are pruned only across the top, resulting in sparse or even naked bottoms, not a pretty sight!

I hope you are having a great week!   Deborah